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[Reprinted from The American Historical Review, Vol. XIII., No. 2, Jan., 1908.] 



THE AMERICAN ACTA SANCTORUM^ 

It was natural, and almost inevitable, that a large part of the 
literature of the Middle Ages should consist of the lives of the 
saints. The world was a Christian world. In nearly all countries, 
most writers were ecclesiastics. In a society unreservedly Chris- 
tian in theory, the main endeavor of clerical writing would surely 
be to persuade rough men so to live that at the end they might be 
added to the joyful company of the elect. The saints were those 
ascertained by universal judgment or papal declaration to inhabit 
already the mansions of felicity, where evermore they interceded 
for the members of the church militant. What more natural than 
that, for the edification of the latter, clerical authors should recount 
in detail the lives of those who had fought the good fight, had 
struggled with success up the thorny pathway, had proved that the 
sanctified life was not impossible to flesh and blood, even to the 
ardent flesh and insurgent blood of the Middle Ages ? Accordinglv 
we have multitudes of such biographies, whose popularity is at- 
tested by the great number of manuscript copies in which some of 
them have survived even to our own time. 

It is well known that, in the relative paucity of materials for 
many portions of medieval history, these pious narratives have been 
put to frequent and efifective use by historians. Sometimes, since 

Even in a palace life may be led well, 

the saint whose life the historian finds among his materials was 
himself a man of high position, whose life is an important part of 
the political history of his country. Such was St. Louis, whose 
life by the Sire de Joinville is a classical and indispensable part of 
the record of French national development. Such in a less degree 
but in a darker country was St. Margaret of Scotland, whose life 
by Abbot Turgot tells us more of the reign of her husband King 
Malcolm and of the life of the Scottish nobility and court than we 
can learn for other parts of that dim century from all other sources 
put together. That the biographies of statesmen like St. Dunstan 

^ Annual address of the president of the American Historical Association, 
delivered at Madison, December 27, 1907. 



287 J- F. Jameso7i 

and St. Thomas of Canterbury, St. Bernard and St. Eligius, fur- 
nish invaluable materials to the historian, requires no demonstration. 
Other saints, though usually not thus immersed in secular affairs, 
have nevertheless become so involved in particular episodes that 
their memoirs become, for the moment, sources of prime impor- 
tance. We should not willingly part with what we know of the 
ending of the Babylonish Captivity through the activities of St. 
Catherine of Siena ; in the acts of Saint Demetrius the siege of 
Thessalonica by the Avars in 597 is so fully recounted as to give 
us our best details as to the military methods then employed in the 
siege and defence of fortified places. 

Still more obvious and direct is the light which the hagiogra- 
phers cast on European history when their subjects have borne a 
leading part in clerical or Christian movements. Biographies like 
those of St. Cyril and St. Martin, St. Patrick and St. Boniface, are 
often our chief materials for understanding the conversion of nortn- 
ern and western Europe to Christianity, surely one of the most 
memorable movements in human history. In the later ages, it is 
in the lives of St. Francis and St. Dominic and St. Ignatius that 
we may best study, in their early development, those three organi- 
zations which have proved the most potent agencies for maintaining 
vital Christianity in a world already nominally Christian. Of 
another variety are the lives or narratives of travelling saints, whose 
observations are among the chief materials for our knowledge of 
medieval geography. 

Less obvious, but hardly less interesting, is the contribution 
which the lives of the medieval- saints make, indirectly and without 
intention, to our knowledge of social history. Their authors wrote 
for purposes of edification and devotion. Often they gave little 
heed to accuracy of statement; often their clerical prepossessions 
so beclouded -their minds that we cannot trust their testimony in the 
very matters about which they are most concerned to persuade us. 
Often, on the other hand, they furnish invaluable testimony about 
matters respecting which they had no thought of conveying infor- 
mation to any reader. They may falsify the portraits which oc- 
cupy the foregrounds of their pictures, distort and make unreal the 
attitudes and actions which their minds are set on delineating; but 
the background is rendered with photographic fidelity, because 
depicted automatically and unconsciously. It is as certain that the 
biographer of St. Gervinus or St. Gingulphus will give us trust- 
worthy data of the manners and customs of his time, as that the 
great THorcntine nrlists will in the backgrounds of their Biblical 



The American Acta Sanctorum 288 

pictures afford us veracious glimpses of the Tuscan landscape of 
the sixteenth century. They could not do otherwise. Thus from 
the hagiographers we often derive fragments of evidence in social 
history which we should seek in vain in the professed chronicles. 

The pious biographer of the Christian missionary little knew 
that we should value his incidental touches respecting the heathen 
quite as much as his labored tribute to his hero, should eagerly take 
•our first glimpses of pagan Sweden through the eyes of St. Ansgar, 
and treasure what little we can learn of conditions in heathen Ger- 
many, beyond the borders of civilization, from the life of St. Boni- 
face written by a simple-minded companion. Nowhere does the stu- 
dent of folklore find fuller data as to pagan superstitions and prac- 
tices in seventh-century Gaul than in the life of St. Eligius. As 
of the heathen, so also of those humble and inarticulate classes con- 
cerning whose life the chroniclers of the Middle Ages tell us so 
little. Froissart might think of none but lords and ladies; kings 
and barons, bishops and abbots, might fill the canvas of Matthew 
Paris. But the Kingdom of Heaven was a Christian democracy. 
The Northumbrian peasant, the merchant's son of Assisi, the shep- 
herd girl of Lorraine, might become saints, and their biographies, 
especially the stories of their childhood and youth, will be sure to 
convey some precious indications as to the everyday life of the 
classes from which they sprang. Much of our best knowledge of 
the situation of the medieval Jews comes from the lives of those 
sainted children whose blood they were fabled to have shed as a 
means of keeping their unholy passover — St. William of Norwich 
or St. Simon of Trent or the holy child of La Guardia. 

Since it was ordinarily requisite that sanctity should be attested 
by miracles, narratives of miracles play a large part in the lives of 
medieval saints. In these we find many of our best illustrations of 
medieval conditions and manners, and especially in the stories of 
miracles of healing. Such stories are full of instruction respecting 
medieval diseases and medicine, pestilence, manias and hygiene. 
How, for instance, should we know anything of the use of anaes- 
thetics in the Middle Ages, if it were not recorded for us in the life 
of one of the saints that " many persons fall asleep after taking a 
draught of oblivion, which physicians call Iciargion, and are not 
sensible of incisions in their limbs, or sometimes of burning and 
cutting in the vital parts, inflicted on them in this state, and on 
wakmg from sleep are not aware of what has been done to them " ? 

Or again, to take the one point of the language used by edu- 
cated people in England under the first Plantagenets, a question 



289 J. F. Jameson 

respecting which chroniclers are silent ; we have our best indications 
in the hagiographers. William of Canterbury, in his life of St. 
Thomas Becket, gives a story concerning Helewisia de Morville, 
wife of one of St. Thomas's murderers, which represents her, a 
woman of Norman descent, one hundred years after the Conquest. 
as using English when calling for her husband's aid to punish a 
refractory Englishman. " Huwe of Morvill, war, war, Liulf 
haveth his sword ydrawen ", she cries ; English was her natural 
tongue. Again, in Reginald of Coldingham's life of the contem- 
porary hermit St. Godric, it appears that the monks of Durham, 
though Latin was their ordinary language, conversed in English 
with St. Godric, who spoke French only by miracle. The Virgin 
taught St. Godric an English hymn, and this is written down in 
English in Reginald's book, which was intended for the reading of 
Hugh de Puiset, bishop of Durham. From a passage in the life of 
bishop Hugh of Lincoln by the abbot Adam of Eynsham, it appears 
that St. Hugh, who was a Burgundian by birth, did not understand 
the English dialects of Kent and Huntingdonshire, but that he was 
addressed by the natives as if it were naturally to be expected that 
he should understand what they said. 

It would be easy to multiply illustrations of the varied and 
curious ways in which the lives of the saints light up for us W\i 
daily life of the Middle Ages. We see in the biography of St. 
Elizabeth of Hungary the domestic details of a Thuringian castle 
and of the hovels in the villages around it. In the life of St 
Thomas Aquinas we see the characteristics of hazing in medieval 
universities, and later, in that of St. Stanislaus Kostka, we observe 
how the same practice was conducted in the college of the Jesuits 
at Vienna. In the life of St. Etheldreda we perceive, not without 
instruction, that a great abbess of the seventh century allowed her- 
self the luxury of a hot bath only before the great festivals of the 
Church, and then made it a demonstration of humility, by first bath- 
ing her nuns with her own hands. The story of the Campanian 
farmicr complaining to St. Felix of the theft of his oxen, and men- 
acing the saint, if he does not make good the loss caused by liis 
neglect, or, in the life of St. Wulfstan, the story of the man who 
had killed another and "could not on any terms obtain the friend- 
ship, nor by any payment get the pardon," of the man's relatives, 
that of his ordering a nut-tree which overhung a church to be cut 
down, and of the patron's resisting because he sometimes feasted or 
played at dice under its shade, and that of the sacrist who was 
enjoined to burn a candle before Wulfstan's tomb for a year, and 



The American Acta Sanctorum 290 

to repeat fifteen psalms, for having suffered a book which was in 
his custody to be stolen, the many tales of funerals and of church- 
building, of almsgiving, of impiety — such stories as these, though 
individually of little significance, yet when brought together in suf- 
ficient quantity may help us to imagine and to reconstruct those 
vanished states of society which the contemporary chroniclers take 
for granted. 

Not the least interesting result of such study and combining is 
the light which a nation's saints throw on a nation's character. 
" We live by admiration." However much a saint might feel him- 
self to be a member and a champion of the universal church, he 
could not escape being a man of his own country and age ; and in 
the long run those whom time has selected as the chief saints of a 
nation have come to that position through a congeniality with the 
nation's traits that has brought them its steady and natural venera- 
tion. In St. Louis we see the pattern of French chivalry, fearless 
and honorable, full of courtesy and generosity. In Joan of Arc,, 
beatified though not canonized, we see typified the high spirit of the 
French nation, its military instinct, its imaginative heroism, its 
enthusiasm for ideals, its ardor of self-sacrifice. In St. Elizabeth 
of Thuringia we see the type of German domestic and practical 
piety ; in St. Ignatius and St. Francis Xavier the independence, the 
reticence, and the organizing power of the Basque. St. Francis of 
Assisi, with his sensitive poetic imagination, fresh, simple and child- 
like, sympathetic with the poor, joyful in all renunciation, could be 
no other than the best-beloved saint of the Italians. St. Teresa, 
ecstatic in her mystical union with God, yet gay and natural and 
gifted in practical reforms and other dealings with this world, is as 
distinctly the Spaniard as the impulsive, passionate, warm-hearted 
Columba is the genuine Irish Celt, while in St. Cuthbert, buoyant, 
energetic, the strong walker, the lover of the country and of boyish 
sports, we see the genuine Northuml^rian. (Where indeed but in 
Yorkshire would William Paternoster have been struck dumb as 
a punishment for walking alone wath a little girl and not enjoying 
athletic sports?) 

But enough has been said of the profit which historians have 
been able to draw from the stories of the European saints. It is 
time to turn to the specific subject of the present address. It lias 
been entitled " The American Acta Sanctorum ". Its purpose is 
to call attention to an analogous body of material which lies at the 
service of students of American history, and to suggest certain 
reflections as to its content and use. At first thought, obvious dif- 



291 J- F- Jcii}ieson 

ferences strike the mind. The hves of the European saints have 
for the most part been brought together in comprehensive collec- 
tions, chief among them the Acta Sanctorum of the Bollandist fath- 
ers, a stately series of nearly seventy folio volumes, in which the 
original narratives have been treated with all the resources, and are 
accompanied with all the apparatus, of modern historical scholar- 
ship. The American " Acta Sanctorum ", on the other hand, ap- 
pears in the shape of numberless little books, shabby and faded, 
printed most often on provincial presses and seldom straying far 
from the place of origin. Each of them contains an artless biog- 
raphy, composed by some pious friend of the deceased clergyman 
or other saint, in which his spiritual struggles and triumphs, his 
labors in the vineyard or sufferings under persecution, are recounted 
for purposes of edification. Sometimes the little book is an auto- 
laiography ; and there are a few instances of collective biography, 
like certain portions of Mather's Magnalia. But in general we 
have only the shabby little provincial books, first and only editions, 
raw materials of an " Acta Sanctorum ", not to be brought together 
without some difficulty, and nowise provided with a Bollandist ap- 
paratus of critical or historical comment. Aside from such differ- 
ences of form, it must be admitted, as a matter of course, that there 
are differences of character between the mass of medieval literature 
we have been considering and any body of Protestant hagiology, 
mostly lives of married clergymen and laymen living in free modern 
states ; and also that the historian's need of such narratives is less 
urgent when he is dealing with a period much subsequent to the 
invention of the printing-press than when he occupies himself with 
the "Dark Ages. 

Nevertheless, it may fairly be maintained that the American his- 
torical scholar can draw from these ill-printed little memorials of 
local piety much the same varieties of benefit which his European 
brother derives from the imposing folios of the Acta Sanctorum. 
In the first place, not a few of our American saints have borne an 
important part in public aft'airs. The second book of the Magnalia, 
Turell's life of Benjamin Colman, the memoirs of Presidents 
Wheelock, Stiles and Dwight, of Manasseh Cutler and Bishop 
Leonidas Polk, are the lives of persons who exerted great and con- 
tinuous influence on secular movements in their day and generation. 
Others impinged upon the circle of political life for lesser periods, 
or afford us occasional but valued glimpses of its events. The 
autobiography of Rev. Thomas Shepard casts most precious light 
upon the early migration to Massachusetts Bay, the life of Rev. 



The Ame7Hcan Acta Sanctortmi 292 

David Caldwell upon the proceedings of the North Carolina con- 
vention of 1789, that of President Manning upon the devious course 
of Rhode Island in the Continental Congress. One of the best 
accounts of the sea-fight between the frigates United States and 
Macedonian is to be found in an autobiographical book by Samuel 
Leach. Less important, yet of genuine interest, are the curious 
account which John Churchman, a Quaker preacher, gives of his 
appearing before the Assembly of Pennsylvania in 1748 to dissuade 
it from the support of warlike measures ; his narrative of the treaty 
with Teedyuscung and other Indians at Easton in 1757, at which 
he was present ; and the glimpses which saintly John Richardson 
gives us of Penn and Baltimore and Lady Baltimore in 1702. 

As in the parallel case of the European saints, however, we 
naturally find fuller light upon those transactions which would fall 
more distinctly within the usual scope of clerical endeavor. The 
life of John Woolman is surely one of the classics of our colonial 
literature, marked by all that beauty of spirit and of phrase which 
elevation, serenity, the habit of meditation, and intimacy with the 
Bible could so often confer on the writings of the Quakers ; but it 
is also one of the classics of the early anti-slavery movement, and 
one of the best and best-known examples of the class which we are 
describing. The life of good Anthony Benezet, the journals of 
Bishop Coke, are other examples. The anti-slavery movement is 
illustrated by passages in a host of such biographies ; the temper- 
ance movement by others. The essential data regarding the forma- 
tion in 1826 of the Virginia Society for the Promotion of Temper- 
ance, of its local auxiliaries, and of the Georgia State Temperance 
Society some two years later, are best sought in the biography of 
Elder Abner W. Clopton. 

We have also our saintly travellers, whose roamings over our 
vast continent have enriched the history of American geography 
with some of its best materials. What William Rubruk and John 
of Piano Carpini were to medieval geography, that surely were 
Marquette and Jogues and DeSmet, Father Francisco Garces and 
Father Junipero Serra to the exploration of the United States. But 
upon hagiology of this class it is superfluous to dwell in this city, 
in which was prepared for publication Dr. Thwaites's splendid 
series of the Jesuit Relations. 

But, as in the European case, many of the most interesting and 
most valuable bits of historical knowledge which we can obtain from 
our American saints' lives are conveyed to us by the author with- 
out his intending to do anything of the sort. Contemporary biog- 



293 J- ^- J(tiJicson 

rapher or autobiographer, he pictures unconsciously, so far as he 
pictures it at all, the social milieu which he saw before him. His 
object is to edify, to bring about the conversion of precious souls. 
If we obtain from his pages anything else than our edification or 
conversion, it is " corhan, that is to say a gift " ; it has been no part 
of his purpose to furnish materials for the historian. All the more 
certain is it that what we thus obtain will be trustworthy evidence, 
except in so far as some general prepossession of the preacher, for 
which we can make allowance, shall enter in to darken his picture 
of the actual unregenerate world. 

In one particular our analogy will be found defective. The 
Protestant world having assumed that since the time of the apostles 
the mediation of the saints has not had the power of effecting mira- 
cles, we shall not find in our American Protestant lives an exact 
parallel to those miraculous tales which have so large a place in 
medieval hagiology, and which furnish us so many interesting 
glimpses into the lives of those mostly humble persons for whose 
benefit the miracles were wrought. But after all the defect is fairly 
well supplied. If the Protestant biographer is not disposed to main- 
tain that his hero could work miracles, yet he knows well that God 
defends his elect, and often interposes through " special provi- 
dences " to protect clergymen of his favorite denomination. Thus, 
though miracles performed at the saint's tomb or by his relics are 
absent, the pages of American hagiology bristle with special pro- 
vidences, by means of which we often penetrate into the obscurity 
of colonial or frontier life. 

As the saints of old, and their biographers, lead us within sight 
of the heathen of Sweden or of Saxony, or as through the eyes of 
St. Francis Xavier we view the natives of Goa and Travancore, of 
the Moluccas and Japan, so by means of the American missionaries 
we see the Indians of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It 
is extraordinary, how large a part of our knowledge of their charac- 
ters and their sociology is derived from the lives or narratives of 
such men — of Eliot and Brainerd, of the Jesuits of the north and 
the Franciscans of the southwest. The same is true of the life of 
the frontier. Few travellers show us so much of the actual condi- 
tions of backwoods existence as the itinerant missionaries—of the 
clearings and the log-cabins, the rude agriculture and the perpetual 
fevers, the camp-meetings and the Indian depredations, the frater- 
nal kindness and the limitless hospitality. Best of all for our pur- 
poses are the Methodist circuit-riders, keen, hearty men, whose out- 
door life kept them healthy in mind and body, and whose grasp on 

AM HIST. REV., VOL. XIII. — 20. 



The American Acta Sancto7'iun 294 

the real world had never been relaxed by education. As one of 
them says, who at the risk of his life had ridden the Clarksburg cir- 
cuit during the Indian wars preceding Wayne's treaty, " To speak 
in backwoods style, they appeared to be surrounded by a kind of 
holy ' knock-'em-down ' power, that was often irresistible ". They 
were not forever feeling their spiritual pulses and doubting of their 
own salvation, like some anaemic graduates of theological semin- 
aries whose biographers have deemed them very precious vessels 
because of the very traits that made them useless ; nor were they 
forever walking in visions, like so many of the Quaker itinerants, 
whose books are often so beautiful and to the historical inquirer 
so disappointing. Stout-hearted, downright, muscular, practical, 
the circuit-rider faced the actual world of the frontier, and saw it 
clearly. If like Peter Cartwright or Henry Smith he leaves behind 
him a description of what he saw, we are much the gainers. 

But even in the older parts of the country, there have been re- 
gions or classes of which we know little unless by chance we find 
some faint record in the early life of one who rose out of them to 
saintship. We know well the leaders of Virginia politics and so- 
ciety at the time of the Revolution — every important thought and 
sentiment of Washington and Jefferson, Madison and Henry. But 
were it not for what little we can glean from the lives of Rev. 
Devereux Jarratt and Elder Barton W. Stone, should we know 
one fact, aside from genealogy and county records, about the poor 
people of Bath Parish and Pittsylvania County, their sentiments and 
their opinions? If it were a question of Boeotia or of early Wes- 
sex, we should treasure every such fact with minute care. Why 
should we not treasure with equal zeal the little glimpses into life 
on West River which are afforded us by the memoirs of Thomas 
Story, or the quaint pictures which his fellow-Quaker John Rich- 
ardson gives us of Bermuda and its governor, of Nantucket society 
at the beginning of the eighteenth century and of its Deborah, 
Mary Starbuck? 

Not less interesting than the occasional glimpses which we ob- 
tain into the lives of out-of-the-way communities, or of inarticulate 
classes not represented in literature, are many passages in the lives 
of Catholic or Protestant worthies who were not of English descent. 
They paint for us the obscure processes of Americanization. 
Quaintly expressed, but typical of American conditions, is the re- 
ligious experience of Brother Crum, a German Methodist in Mary- 
land. He said, " I prayed in Dutch ; I am Dutch ; and must get 
converted in Dutch. These are all English people, and they got 



295 J- ^- Jci^^^son 

converted in English. I prayed and prayed in Dutch, but could not 
get the blessing. As last I felt willing to get converted in English 
or Dutch, as the Lord pleased. Then the blessing came, and I got 
converted in English." 

It would not be easy to enumerate all the little ways in which the 
lives of the American saints may enlarge our knowledge of the 
social background, the substantial warp of our American fabric. 
Many saints studied at the small colleges of our early days, many 
taught in country schools or academies ; we can learn something 
from them, incidentally, of the progress of education. They show 
us something of slavery. Anthony Jefferson Pearson is w^arned by 
his father and, his biographer thinks, might well have been anxious 
in his own mind, lest his connection with the African Sabbath 
School in. the little town in Tennessee where he is attending college 
might injure him in the estimation of others. He prayerfully tosses 
up a coin — it is the year 1831, when extreme reformers had their 
fullest swing — to determine whether his course through this vale 
of tears, this solemn period of probation, shall be marked by the 
moderate use of tea and coffee, or whether he shall confine himself 
strictly to water. It is not without interest to learn that even in 
181 7, at Augusta, Georgia, it was already customary for the piano 
to be drowned by conversation at all tea-parties ; and the street cries 
of early Boston are illustrated by the imitations of them with which 
a youthful saint awakes from sleep and shows to the ear of her 
anxious parent and biographer that she has passed the crisis of a 
dangerous illness. We know what our sensations are on seeing a 
peach-orchard. What were those of Elder Abner W. Clopton in 
1828? " Seeing a flourishing peach-orchard by the road, he felt so 
sensibly on the consequences which it would produce, that he en- 
tered the house of the owner, and warned him, or rather his lady, 
of the danger of the temptation — expressing his fears that the fruit 
of that orchard would bring her to widowhood, and her babes to 
orphanage. In two years his fears were realized ". To the elder's 
mind, a peach-orchard had but one meaning; in that meaning lies 
the explanation of the western insurrection of 1794. 

More broadly speaking, the distilled essence of a multitude of 
these saintly biographies is able, as in the case of the European 
nations, to show us something of national character. Certain traits 
which are characteristic or frequent in the lives of medieval saints 
are absent or curiously infrequent in those of America. They are 
not records of austerities and macerations. The Methodist circuit- 
rider came eating and drinking. The chickens fled at his approach. 



The American Acta Sanctoj^um 296 

The American saint has lived his Hfe in the world, not in a mon- 
astery. His piety has been a Protestant piety, looking toward 
edification and sanctification of the human being much more than 
toward the ceaseless adoration of God, contemplative resignation to 
his will, mystical absorption in his essence. We find few ecstasies 
like those of St. Teresa. There is a striking want of poetic or 
imaginative touches. The American saint may be capable of ex- 
alted self-sacrifice, but he does not ceremoniously take Lady Poverty 
to be his bride. He shows us no parallel to St. Francis preaching 
to the birds, or singing the praises of the Lord responsively with 
the nightingales of Assisi. He lives in the dry air of this western 
world, and shares its active, practical, work-a-day life. He has 
little depth of thought, little subtlety of theology. The triumphant 
debates with opponents, which his biographer so often records with 
admiration, are triumphs of Philistine smartness rather than of 
candor or elevation or spiritual discernment. But, like his nation^ 
he makes up for lack of depth by dexterity, versatility and practical 
efficiency. He knows what to do in an emergency, and carries into 
the life of the circuit-rider, the missionary or the reformer that 
quickness of invention bred in generations of Americans by the 
life of the forest or the isolated farmstead. Nowhere in literature 
will you find a completer manifestation of the universal Yankee, 
inventive, resourceful, brimming over with energy and enterprise, 
than in the life of the Rev. Cyrus Hamlin, missionary in Constan- 
tinople. Not for him the mere preaching of sermons. He must 
be up and doing. To give work to his Armenian converts in the 
time of the Crimean war, he organizes great bakeries which supply 
the allied armies. He enters into the laundry business, and, when 
his protegees are halted a moment by the indescribable condition 
of the soldiers' clothing, he devises machinery to enable them to 
perform their task. He invents the best cholera mixture ever 
known in Turkey. He establishes factories wherein some of his 
people can support themselves by making stove-pipes, instructs 
others in the manufacture of rat-traps, invents a new kind of coffee- 
mill, and meantime maintains a theological seminary and founds a 
college. 

The American saints have also imbibed from their native at- 
mosphere a cheerful and hopeful spirit, which not even the extreme 
rigors of ultra-Calvinism can wholly destroy. They know them- 
selves to be members of a rising empire, in which the common man 
shall have opportunities he has nowhere enjoyed before. They feel 
themselves to be in the full stream of progress, and with lusty cour- 



297 J- F. Jameson 

age and enthusiasm lay their lands upon the oar. They are like 
Andrew Marvell's exiles in the " remote Bermudas " : 

Thus sung they in the English boat 
A holy and a cheerful note, 
And all the while, to guide their chime, 
With falling oars they kept the time. 

Not less characteristic is it that the sense of progress is so often, 
at any rate among the saints of the nineteenth century, expressed 
numerically. The dry American mind loves figures. Chiefly occu- 
pied with measurable material tasks — the subduing of the wilder- 
ness, the bridging of rivers, the laying of railroads, the growing 
of crops— the American has acquired an inveterate interest in sta- 
tistic, in the making of a " record ", and carries it with him into 
other than practical concerns. He thinks arithmetically concern- 
ing his church, his paintings and his sports. Those who compare 
American athletics to those of Greece forget that the Greek had no 
stop-watch, no accurate means of measuring time. Does the Amer- 
ican actually love out-of-door sports, the pleasure of the pathless 
woods, the " breezy call of incense-breathing morn ", or does he 
love numerical records of out-of-door sports? Certainly the crowd 
in front of the newspaper's tabular bulletin-board seems not less 
intent than the crowd on the " grand-stand ". Certainly there is 
a deep and widespread interest in the framing of " all-America " 
nines and elevens, one of the most disinterestedly ideal of all mathe- 
matical employments. In a similar spirit. Rev. Peter Cartwright 
and his fellows do not often fail to let us know the number of those 
converted at each camp-meeting. 

It would be wrong to exaggerate the interest of these little lives 
of long-forgotten worthies, or the amount which they can yield to 
the student of American social history or of national psychology. 
In most of them there are long arid stretches. Most of them are 
written in the " patois of Canaan ", in the set phrases of obsolete 
theologies, making difficult or tedious reading for the modern in- 
quirer. If one ventures to insist a little upon their utility to the 
younger investigator, it is from a sense of a real danger which 
besets the latter's pathway, the danger of confining himself to the 
constitutional and political history of America, now so easy to study, 
and from a consequent desire to urge upon him the claims which 
American religious history may make upon one who wishes a full 
understanding of the American character and spirit. One would 
not wish to trench upon the field so excellently covered by last 



The American Acta Sanctorum 298 

year's presidential address before this association; and indeed it i? 
obvious that the study of the social history and national psycholog) 
of the United States may and must be approached by many path- 
ways. Yet there is something to be said for the contention that, 
of all means of estimating American character from American his- 
tory, the pursuit of religious history is the most complete. If we 
approach the problem through the history of American literature 
we are in constant danger of forgetting how small the literary class 
is and always has been. Even if we include the readers as well as 
the producers, we cannot assume that the traits which are revealed 
by our literary writings are necessarily those of the nation at large, 
the obscure, unreading, unprinting majority. The cleverest of 
books upon our literary history seems often to make defective esti- 
mates of our national character for want of access to the minds of 
these inarticulate ones. What is true of literature, is even more 
true of philosophy. If we turn to the history of the plastic arts in 
America, how brief, how limited has been their course. Not 
through them, surely, can the American spirit be made to yield up 
its total secret, be appreciated in its general extent. The historv 
of American music is an equally slender stream. Little of Amer- 
ican life beyond that of recent years and large cities can be said 
to be reflected in it. How slight a part music played in the first 
one hundred and fifty years of our colonial existence, even in the 
most intelligent of our towns, may be seen by a delicious passage in 
one of our saintly biographies, Turell's life of Dr. Benjamin Col- 
man. The worthy doctor makes a series of proposals to his Boston 
congregation and others, advocating that the old psalm-book should 
be enriched by more modern additions. Among these proposals we 
find the following, which paints to the life the musical abilities of 
a Boston congregation, thirty years before the Revolution ; 

8. That with respect unto such Psalms as Dr. Watts has adapted 
only to a Tune which our Congregation 'cannot sing, either we resolve 
upon learning and bringing into Use among us said Tune, or that a new 
Metre of such Psalms, or part of them, be attempted as near as we can 
turn them to his Stile and Manner. 

He who would understand the American of past and present 
times, and to that end would provide himself with data representing 
all classes, all periods, and all regions, may find in the history of 
American religion the closest approach to the continuous record 
he desires. Not that all or even most Americans have been re- 
ligious, but there have been religious men and women in every 
class, every period, every subdivision of America, and multitudes 



2 99 J' ^' Jciti^sson 

of them have left individual or collective records of their thoughts 
and ways and feelings. Millions have felt an interest in religion 
where thousands have felt an interest in literature or philosophy, 
in music or art. Millions have known little of any book save one, 
and that one the most interesting of religious books, the most influ- 
ential, the most powerful to mould and transform. Doubtless they 
were occupied mainly with the tasks of daily life ; their achieve- 
ments in these, and the conflicts of economic interest which accom- 
panied them, may be reduced to solid and instructive statistics, with- 
out which social history may become unsubstantial and vague. Rut 
no view is truthful that leaves out of account the ideals which ani- 
mated these toiling millions, the thoughts concerning the universe 
and man which informed their minds. The Spanish trooper held 
himself to be ever in the hand of the God of Israel, who guided his 
chosen people by pillars of fire and of cloud. The Puritan farmer 
sighted his promised land from the top of Pisgah, and thought of 
no similitude for his Indian warfare but the smiting of the Hittites 
and the Jebusites. The imagination of the pioneer mother, making- 
with her baby the weary journey through the western wilderness, 
had no parallel to dwell on but that of the Flight into Egypt. 

Moreover, the history of religion in America holds a peculiarly 
close relation to the general history of the American spirit from the 
fact that here, more than elsewhere, the concerns of churches have 
been managed by the laity or in accordance with their will. If ever 
anywhere ecclesiastical history can be rightly treated as consisting 
solely of the history of ecclesiastics, certainly it has not been so in 
the United States. It has reflected the thoughts and sentiments, 
not of a priestly caste, but of the mass of laymen. An acute Eng- 
lish observer, Bishop Coke, speaking of the able debates he heard 
at the conference of the Methodist preachers of America in 1792. 
says, " Throughout the debates they conducted themselves as the 
servants of the people, and therefore never lost sight of them on 
any question." 

Let us take a few examples. In the psychic life of Europe we 
recognize the middle portion of the eighteenth century as a time of 
heightened emotionality. We see this in the Sturm und Drang 
literature of Germany, in Rousseau and the Methodists, in the wave 
of national feeling that swept William Pitt to supreme power. In 
treating the European history of that period, we should never think 
of ignoring phenomena so significant. Ought we then, when we 
are dealing with the same age in the history of a country which was 
practically without literature, art or nationality, to ignore the Great 



The American Acta Sanctoi ii?n 



\oo 



Awakening, or to treat it otherwise than as the most important and 
significant event of its time? 

Fifty years later we hear in the spiritual life of Europe another 
modulation of key, the Romantic Movement. The richer culture 
of the Old World enables us to trace it in many manifestations, in 
the shifting of ground from rationalism to mysticism, in the rapid 
heightening of national feeling, in the abrupt transition from The 
Botanic Garden of Dr. Erasmus Darwin to Childe Harold and The 
Battle of the Baltic. Such a wave of feeling, we may be sure, could 
not fail to transmit itself across the Atlantic, and to be manifested 
in some form in the America of 1800, still colonially dependent 
upon the European mind. We do indeed trace a slight romantic 
movement in American literature, a faint heightening of American 
patriotism, slowly mustering courage for the War of 181 2. But 
if we would seek the most powerful and pervasive manifestation of 
the movement, the best analogy which the poverty of American 
culture permitted, we can find it nowhere else than in the wonder- 
ful religious revivals which in those years swept through America, 
and especially through the forest camp-meetings of the non-literary 
West. It is a narrow-minded student who pursues with eager in- 
terest every tortuous move of Jefifersonian diplomacy but disdains 
to read of these vital movements, or who fails to perceive how 
closely and with what equal steps the really great political advances 
of the Jeffersonian era are accompanied by parallel movements in 
theology and religion, the growth of the Methodists. Unitarians 
and Disciples, with their heightened sense of the dignity of human 
nature and of the importance of fraternal union. Equally limited 
is the mind which can not find in the early story of Mormonism a 
prime source of illumination upon the actual mentality of the ob- 
scure villagers of 1830. 

With a little hesitation, one may take a pregnant example from 
the history of the latest period. The most interesting American 
historical biography published in recent years, and one deserving 
an important place in our " Acta Sanctorum ", is the life of Mrs. 
Mary Eddy. A plea for the study of American religious history 
by others than young theologues may well take account of the move- 
ment which she represents. We have here no concern with thv.- 
validity or invalidity of its theological or philosophical basis. We 
are only to consider it, with all proper respect, as a phenomenon' 
in the American history of the last twenty-five years. Great pains 
have been expended in the effort to separate fact from baseless 
tradition in the early years of Mohammedanism. We welcome with 



30I J ' F. Jameson 

enthusiasm those wonderful discoveries of early Manichaean manu- 
scripts through which the Prussian Academy's recent explorations 
in Turkestan have laid before us the development of another great 
modification of Christianity. But here we have growing up among 
us, in the full light of day, a new religion with a million adherents, 
threatening in the early years of the twentieth century as grave an 
invasion of the domain of traditional Christianity as Joachim of 
Flora and the Eternal Gospel threatened in the early years of the 
thirteenth ; and how many young doctors of philosophy, concerned 
with recent history, have made a thorough study of the movement ? 
Yet he who cannot explain it to himself must not pretend that he 
understands the American society of the last quarter-century — or 
at any rate the bourgeois society of our long-settled communities ; 
since it is from the bourgeois portions of settled society that new 
religions are apt to spring. 

We are accustomed to adjourn such explanations by saying that 
it is too soon to make them ; and no doubt this is true. Yet certain 
lines of remark seem already open. We can measure the distance 
we have come. It is a long remove from the tribal god of the earlv 
Puritans, the vertebrate Jehovah, the self-conscious martinet of a 
troubled universe, to the vague and circumambient deity of Mrs. 
Eddy, the fluid source of therapeutic beneficence. But it marks 
a long transition in our social life. The early colonist, his life en- 
vironed with dangers and studded with marked events, must have 
on high a conscious and watchful sovereign, ever ready to protect 
the body and to chasten the soul by drastic interpositions. At the 
other extreme, 

We sit here in the Promised Land 

That flows with Freedom's honey and milk. 

Few of us are ever in personal danger. We have had years of 
extraordinary prosperity. The comfortable middle-class society of 
our settled communities has had little occasion to feel the heart- 
gripping stresses of danger and calamity and remorse. In such a 
soft society, illness and physical pain easily come to seem the chief 
evils of life. Consciousness of nerves and consciousness of the 
processes of digestion come to take nearly the place which con- 
sciousness of sin held in the mind of the seventeenth-century Anicr- 
ican. Such a society, the product of peace and industrial pros- 
perity, is sure to be seized with great power by a religion which 
cheerfully ignores evil and which, whatever its claims upon superior 
intellects, presents itself to the mass of bourgeois minds as pri- 
marily a religion of healing. 



The Ainericaii Acta Sanctornni 



?02 



Why do not Americans study more intently the age of the An- 
tonines? There they will find a state of society singularly resem- 
bling our own — a world grown prosperous and soft and humane 
with long-continued peace and abounding industrial development. 
a population formed by the mixture of all races, in which the ancient 
stock still struggles to rule and to assimilate, but is powerless to 
preserve unimpaired its traditions, a mushroom growth of cities, 
a universal passion for organization into industrial unions and fra- 
ternal orders, a system in which woman has exceptionally full equal- 
ity with man, a society in which the newly rich occupy the centre 
of the stage, offending the eye with the vulgar display of brute 
wealth yet pacifying the mind and heart with the record of number- 
less and kindly benefactions. In this soft and genial society, the 
benign product of world-wide peace and growing wealth, we may 
find analogies for almost every phenomenon of present-day Amer- 
ican religion, from the sumptuous ritual of historic churches to the 
crude deceptions of vagrant astrologers, from the " timbrelled an- 
thems " of the Salvation Army to the viscous rhetoric of Christian 
Science. Isis and Mithra and the pagan origins of Gnosticism can 
help us to understand the swarming religions of Chicago and New 
York, and through them the society to which they belong. 

To the young teacher or investigator, to whom such discourses 
as this are principally or most hopefully addressed, such illustra- 
tions may seem far-fetched and inconclusive. Possibly they are so. 
But it may be hoped that at least the main theses of this address 
may nevertheless receive on the part of such hearers a careful con- 
sideration. In every other period of recorded time, we know that 
the study of religion casts valuable light on many other aspects of 
history. Why should it be otherwise with the religious history of 
America? Unless we are content to confine ourselves to the well- 
worn grooves of constitutional and political history, and to resign 
to sciences less cautious than history the broad story of American 
culture, why should we not seek light from every quarter? Most 
of all let us seek it from the history of American religion, in the 
sum total an ample record, even though in parts we have to com- 
pose it like a mosaic from fragments of unpromising material. 

J. Franklin Jameson. 



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